Shortly after firing up Skyrim on my PC, I nearly ‘rage quit’ over the menu system and user interface. Granted, not everyone will get stuck in a menu after opening a book in their inventory… damn TAB key!

In this article, I will explain how to use the interface for Skyrim on the PC and explain how it can be better than simply clicking around the screen with the mouse.

Update 11/29/2011: A patch will be released tomorrow for PC that will supposedly improve the menu and controls in general. It should also address the crash on startup issue I discuss in my other Skyrim article.

Interface Breaks at Character Creation

I had a hell of a time setting up my character. If you didn’t know, you can use the mouse to move your characters face around the screen. It seems, though, that every time I shifted my player’s face to a different angle, there was a 50% chance that the menu would quit responding to the keyboard.

I was unable to make this stop happening, but it was easy enough to get working again. Simply click on a body part at the top of the screen and the keyboard will work again.

I Opened A Book and I’m Trapped

At the beginning of the game, I picked up the first book I saw in the keep. After reading through it, I noticed that it only said “[A][D] Turn Pages” and did not explain how to exit from the reading view.

After being very frustrated for a few minutes, I found that you can exit the menu at any time by pressing TAB. What was really annoying is that pressing ESC seemed to be the logical thing to do, but that only brought up the pause menu on top of the menu that was already open.

Cant Use the Mouse to Click Menu Items

Blasphemy! It is true, you cannot use the mouse on a lot of interface items, but the key is that the entire menu is controlled by your keyboard hand. At first I thought I was forced to use the arrow keys, but it’s actually your movement keys.

After you know how to use it, the menu becomes intuitive and satisfying. Here is the summary:

You navigate up, down, left, and right using keys W,A,S,D

Use the E key to confirm choices

Use the E key also to equip/unequip/use items

Use the TAB key to cancel/back out of choices

Use the TAB key also to open and close the menu

Press J for your Journal

Press I for your inventory

Press Q for your Favorites menu

Press F on an item to mark it as a Favorite

Press R on an item to drop it

After collecting your basic armor and weapon at the beginning of the game, you can quickly and fluidly enter the inventory menu, equip all the items, and exit the menu. The same can be said for looting, which utilizes the E key and TAB key. It makes grabbing tens of thousands of items effortless and fast.

Assign Weapons and Items to Number Keys

This is a great tip- now you can assign your favorite sword or spell to a number key and not worry about any menus at all.

16 Comments

Thank you for the info. Your opinion of the UI as “intuitive and satisfying” after ‘accepting/resiggning to the fact’ a mouse is not ideal for navigation are at the very least optimistic and probably a little misleading to those yet to experience it.
Personnaly i feel “useable & less frustrating” to be appropriate.
It has been said many many times by reviewer and reader alike how horrible the UI isand how apparantly obvious it has been designed purely with controllers in mind, which may mean there is a PC friendly patch soon to come but most believe bethesda are unlikely to fix it so many are looking to the modding community.
There is already a Hard Assigned Key editor tool (enabaling “Hard Assigned Keys” uneditable keys to now be set by the user) as well as Font changes not to mention mouse movement tweaks.

Thanks for your input. I stand by my earlier opinion even more now that I have played awhile. Knowing how the menu works with a keyboard is faster and more streamlined than relying only on a mouse. Buying and selling, looting, managing inventory, toggling favorites, are all literally at my fingertips.

My favorite is having my torch marked as a favorite and being able to tap QEQ (open favorites, equip torch, close favorites) when I am sneaking around to instantly have light. I can keep my mouse moving to look around and don’t have to lose my immersion to open up inventory and click on stuff.

They *should* have allowed for both input types… maybe they will patch that. However, I definitely forgot about the menu after the first 30 minutes and haven’t thought about it since.

Like previous Bethesda games, Skyrim doesn’t use more than 2gb of RAM, regardless of how much you actually have. Using a large address aware patch will fix that, allowing Skyrim to make full use of your system’s abilities. Simply follow the tutorial here ( http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=134 ). It won’t automatically make your screenshots look as good as Dead End Thrills (http://deadendthrills.com/?cat=314 ), but it’s a start.”

strangely the nude mod wasn’t in the top 10 even though it is the favourite at Nexus…. pff pcgamers jorno trying to appear respectable, censorship tut tut we want the truth!

I think the mouse is often over-rated for menus in PC games. People seem to think that because a mouse has such precise movement, and is used for so many things in Windows, that it must be the best option for game menus. But think about how power users actually use their PCs: whether it’s a coder, a Photoshop guru, or an experienced MSWord user, they all have one thing in common: they use HOTKEYS as much as possible, and their mouse as little as possible, because moving your mouse all around the screen for everything wastes time.

So, I have no problem with the interface being geared away from the mouse. I do however hate how the combination of mouse/keyboard is glitchy. For example, the mouse scrollwheel is ideal for Skyrim’s scrollable menus, and is faster than pressing W and S repeatedly. But when you combine the scrollwheel for navigation with the “E” key for selection, it often doesn’t register properly. I’ve often said the wrong thing in conversations or sold the wrong thing in the barter menu because of that glitch.

On top of glitches like this, there are other design faults too, like the monochrome colouring system: a conversation response you haven’t said before is white, a conversation response you have said before is light grey, a conversation response you have said before but have your mouse on is light grey, but a little lighter than the other light greys, and so on…..talk about obtuse.

I’m thinking that I’ll just play this with a gamepad – it’s obviously designed for it from the ground up, so why kill myself fighting it?

1. You guys are bitchy.
2. You all must not play PC games that often.
3. You can click on items you are just a idiot.

I say this because the UI is flawless, nothing wrong with it, feel natural everything is easy to find and its not cluttered, only thing I don’t like about is there is no item description (as in origin of the item or common use bla bla bla.)

I say that you all must not play PC games often because a real PC gamer does these things first:
1. Mess with the graphic settings.
2. Play/Watch the opening of the game.
3. Mess with the in game options.
4. Once at a “safe zone” mess with the most common keys used in most PC games.

I fit your description of gamer, however I think the UI is poorly designed for mouse use. As someone else pointed out, mixing between mouse and keyboard can have the wrong item selected in menus. This means you have your mouse over something and something else is being highlighted. This is not 100% which actually makes it more annoying.

The problem with that is that not everyone who uses a keyboard uses WASD for movement.

If you put your hands on the keyboard the way you naturally use them, your hands are on the ASDF keys. This means that some of use use ESDF for movement instead. E=forward D=Back S=strafe left and F=strafe right.

If you use the in game option to rebind keys and rebind the F key, you suddenly are stuck with not being able to open the Favorites screen.

Flawless?? You are on crack. If you are going to make a PC title and give people the option to rebind keys, you absolutely MUST give them the ability to rebind any damn thing in the interface. In this case, you need to have an option to rebind Favorites to something besides F.

cant use E? Is your keyboard is broken? If so, you can buy one for 10 bucks.

Otherwise, you can always use the command console to fix it (I assume you are saying you need to pick up a book for a quest, but cant?).

The setstage command is for advancing broken quests or for skipping ahead to a certain point in a quest.
You could also use additem to place the book in your inventory. Reading it there may trigger what you need to happen.

You can find all the stages/item codes on Google by searching for Skyrim console commands.

I thought the game was broken and also almost rage quit (I still might). Its obviously MS pushing its GFWL/XBOX extorion agenda on a customer even after they have paid for an item that should rightfully be able to expect has not been purposefully hobbled.

Thank goodness for the hacker community.

And as far as memorizing combinations of hot key being more intuitive that pointing at what you want with a cursor and clicking on it, well that contradicts the whole underlining theory of this new touch screen wave including windows 7 doesn’t it.

Besides it just being obviously not true.

Shame that corporate greed has mauled something that could have been better.
Again!

I’m glad that I didn’t pay to much for it 😉 or I’d feel much more ripped off about it.